A Year of Telepathy

I mean a set of if/else chains is, in the broadest sense, AI

but it's not the AI that Altman is selling, ditto for ML

I guess there are three "competing" ideas:

- The ends justify the means - Meaning we could justify torture if it prevents terrorism for example. Some people would consider this fine, others not.

- Some moral principles or duties have intrinsic value independent of their outcomes - For example, telling the truth might be considered right not because of its consequences, but because honesty itself is inherently valuable.

- Both means and ends matter - Actions are justified when there's moral harmony between how we act and what we achieve. This suggests that good ends achieved through ethical means have a different moral quality than the same ends achieved through harmful means.

Probably I'd put myself in the latter camps, rather than the first two. But then I haven't thought about this too deeply myself, so happy to hear the opinions of others who might have thought about it more :)

My first puzzled interpretation was of a "reservoir of co-pays", as if there was some kind of financial/insurance exploitation going on.

Do you believe that killing a pig for bad or sloppy neuroscience research that provides no useful data is worth it?

To use an extreme example, say I have a theory that the brain is an unnecessary organ. Can I go around removing pig brains in the name of “neuroscience research” and get a free pass?

Okay, now suppose I want to test if my new brain implant that I intend to attach with known acutely neurotoxic binding agent is safe for long term use. I then observe that the acutely neurotoxic binding agent causes acute brain damage like it said it would and thus my implant is unsafe for long term use. Do I get a free pass for that even though I killed an animal to learn something the manual already told me?

Okay, now suppose I want to test if implant A is safe for long term use. But when I go to do the surgery I insert implant B because I took the wrong implants out of the storehouse because I did not follow standard practice and go through my checklist as any competent doctor should. I then repeat this say 24 more times before realizing that I have inserted the wrong implants into around half of the test subjects. I then kill the animals when I realize my mistake because no useful data can be drawn due to my mistake. Do I get a free pass for “experiments” that even I acknowledge are worthless because I made a mistake because I ignored standard practice that has practices explicitly designed to cheaply and easily avoid the class of mistake I made?

Killing a pig for high-quality neuroscience research can be worth more than eating it. However, there are plenty of forms of “neuroscience research” that are objectively useless that confer less benefit than eating it or are even actively harmful and thus confer only harm. These forms of “neuroscience research” can still be unethical even if we, as a society, continue to eat meat.

BCIs have been doing what Neuralink is showing off since at least the 90s. It is emphatically not a difficult concept to understand that you can put wires in the brain and someone can learn to influence signals on those electrodes. Hell, Deep Brain Stimulation has been an FDA approved use of putting electrodes in your brain since 1997.

The hard parts of BCI are: Electrode sensing, but that's a much less difficult problem nowadays. Implant longevity, probably an unsolvable problem without massive advancements in understanding the body. Brain surgery, which will never not be a huge deal because piercing the barriers that protect the brain is just inherently a huge deal and risky to do.

I'm pretty sure Neuralink is the only one mass killing monkeys though.

Note that Elon has also helped push for the killing of US science funding, like funding used to further study BCIs. How convenient for him that all his competition is suddenly going to struggle.